Big Linked Geospatial Data and its Application to Earth Observation

Terrabytes of geospatial data have been made freely available recently on the Web. For example, data from gazetteers such as Geonames, maps from geospatial search engines like Google Maps and OpenStreetMap, and user-contributed content form social networks such as Foursquare.

Some particularly important rich sources of open and free geospatial data are the satellite programs of various countries such as .the Landsat program of the US and the Copernicus programme of the European Union. Satellite images can be utilized in many applications with financial and environmental impact in areas such as emergency management, climate change, agriculture and security. This potential has not been fully realized up to now, because satellite data ``is hidden'' in various archives operated by NASA, ESA and national space agencies. Therefore, a user that .would like to develop an application needs to search in these archives, discover the needed data and integrate it in his .application. In this talk we show how to ``break these silos open'' by publishing their data as RDF, interlink it with other relevant data, and make it freely available on the Web to enable the easy development of geospatial applications.

This work has been funded by EU projects Copernicus App Lab, Melodies, Optique, LEO and TELEIOS.

Manolis Koubarakis is a Professor in the Dept. of Informatics and Telecommunications, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He is also an Adjunct Researcher at the Institute of the Management of Information Systems (IMIS) of the “Athena” Research and Innovation Center. He is a Fellow of EurAI (European Association for Artificial Intelligence). He has published more than 170 papers that have been widely cited in the areas of Artificial Intelligence (especially Knowledge Representation), Databases, Semantic Web and Linked Data. His research has been financially supported by the European Commission (projects CHOROCHRONOS, DIET, BRIDGEMAP, Evergrow, OntoGrid, SemsorGrid4Env, TELEIOS, Optique, LEO, MELODIES, WDAqua and BigDataEurope), the Greek General Secretariat for Research and Technology (more recently through the Research Excellence Grant SCARE), the European Space Agency (project Prod-Trees) and industry sources (Microsoft Research and British Telecommunications). He recently co-chaired the European Data Forum 2014 (http://2014.data-forum.eu/), the top European event aiming towards the development of a strong data economy in Europe. He has co-ordinated the well-known projects TELEIOS (http://www.earthobservatory.eu/) and LEO (http://www.linkedeodata.eu/) which developed tools for linked Earth Observation data and linked geospatial data, and applied them to the development of environmental and commercial applications. Manolis’ team has also developed the linked data infrastructure of project MELODIES (http://www.melodiesproject.eu/) which studied how to exploit linked open data in a variety of environmental applications. Manolis currently participates in the project BigDataEurope (http://www.big-data-europe.eu/), a European effort in the area of Big Data with application scenarios in all societal challenges of the Horizon 2020. He also participates in the project WDAqua (http://wdaqua.eu/, Answering Questions using Web Data), a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network. Finally, he also participates in the project Copernicus App Lab (http://www.app-lab.eu/ ) which will make Copernicus services data available as linked data to aid the development of applications by mobile developers.